Path: csiph.com!news.swapon.de!weretis.net!feeder4.news.weretis.net!feeder5.news.weretis.net!news.solani.org!.POSTED!rasp.therandymon.com!not-for-mail From: RS Wood Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: wipe and reinstall Date: Sun, 13 Jan 2019 16:16:48 -0500 Organization: solani.org Lines: 28 Message-ID: <0fmsgf-h6d.ln1@rasp.therandymon.com> Reply-To: randy@therandymon.com X-Trace: solani.org 1547420404 9252 127.0.0.43 (13 Jan 2019 23:00:04 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@news.solani.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 13 Jan 2019 23:00:04 +0000 (UTC) User-Agent: slrn/1.0.3 (Linux) X-User-ID: eJwNyMERACEIBLCWFNgFygFP+i/hnPwC5eZxI2iYR05psTN7ukNncb/wIq2lA7nklqfqdwnEDyUlEQQ= X-Face: 6rW>>7|C1$,hMeGw9xJ1v9}L5=Jq(}":O@72yaUP1?H$W,ZB1)c'mP5; v* Cancel-Lock: sha1:6xVKJ0HFQjSmrX1akRr8gOKTD88= Xref: csiph.com comp.misc:17240 It's not as easy to wipe a Linux partition and restore these days, though ostensibly with Linux that should be one of the advantages. I had a Linux Mint box I wanted to upgrade, so I backed everything up to my FreeNAS, wiped the machine, and then began restoring from my backup, only to find not everything worked as I thought it should, and now I've got a chore trying to figure out what went wrong. The things I most want to avoid having to reconfigure are: Firefox bookmarks, passwords, and history; Evolution IMAP, CardDAV and CALDAV configs, and Cinnamon desktop configs, but those are the exact things that gave me trouble. I think one of the issues is actually security: passwords are hashed using a salt that doesn't carry over to the new machine, so you've got to manually reconnect all the IMAP and DAV configs. Then, Firefox helpfully starts you out with a "fresh" profile, which takes a while to reconfigure (I think they want you to use their Firefox sync service, which in truth would've saved me some hassle - I've begun using it now - but introduces security questions of its own). Lastly, it might've been a permissions problem - looking into that now - but little of my cinnamon install transferred correctly. Very annoying! I remember in the days of fluxbox, mutt, and sylpheed you could very easily backup $HOME to a USB key, wipe your Linux install, and then reinstall $HOME from your USB key. Those days seem to be well and over. Too bad! Don't think FreeBSD would've saved me any time either, it seems to be the way modern Linux apps are configured.